Much like how I believe in life out among the stars. Considering how many billion of stars there are, a fraction of those have planets, a small fraction of those have atmosphere that can sustain life is still a large amount. Needless to say, that life may not be be sentient life, but a small number could be. Love to see if there is a planet Roak out there. :3

We all know it should be a planet, but can you see it in the starry sky? Or are the things we see at night and call stars just suns, or are they planets (and could be Pluto) too?

I was always fascinated by meteorology as a kid growing up, it all started with that amazing hail storm that hit Sydney in 99'. I remember it so vividly too, I was probably 7 or 8 at the time and me and my brother Richard were outside watching this spectacular lighting flash every couple of seconds, the sky had a mesmerizing green tinge to it, something I hadn't ever seen before.

It had just started to rain and we both ran under the veranda roof, I recall the rain being particularly cold. All of a sudden this fucking massive hailstone (about the size of a softball) fell straight into the pool. Now it was just getting dark and there were a lot of kids in the neighborhood so I thought it was literally a softball that someone had hit over our fence and into our pool (mind you, I'd never seen hail bigger than pea size before this.) About 30 seconds had passed before the next one came down and boy did it scare the living shit out of both of us. Our veranda had this long metal handrail that stretched a couple of meters beyond the fiberglass veranda roof. This giant fuckoff hailstone landed direct smack-bang in the center of the handrail and shattered into a thousand little tiny pieces of ice right before our eyes. It hit with such force that it shook the entire veranda and sounded louder than anything I had previously heard to that date.

My tiny brain simply couldn't comprehend what was happening. Softball sized hail falling from the sky, I thought the world was coming to an end. The entire storm came out of nowhere and with zero warning. It knocked out the power and it was just the two of us in a pitch black house listening to the hail destroy the roof tiles one by one. Fucking scary man. I'm certainly not a religious person and have never been one but that was one of the few occasions that I've prayed to god.

That pretty much sparked my curiosity with weather in general and led to a passion for science throughout my high school years. Somewhere along those years I became transfixed with our Sun. This incomprehensibly large ball of energy and magnetism that everything in our solar system spins around. The only thing protecting us from this constant barrage of charged particles and radiation is our magnetic field. Throughout my years of education everyone was always going on about human induced global climate change, methane levels and all that good stuff but to me, they always seemed to overlook our Sun and its relationship with our magnetic field. I believe that Sun plays a much larger role in regards to everything that occurs on Earth than most believe. From earthquakes to global warming.

That was a pretty long tangent. Anyways it's very much a hobby of mine, watching the Sun. Thanks to technology watching through the lense of a telescope is no longer necessary.